Glenn Frey was the Eagles' 'spark plug' – invaluable, driven, reliable

Extract from The Guardian

The guitarist and singer who introduced a generation to country-rock was a determined perfectionist with a good head for business. But it was his voice and his songwriting that made the Eagles the biggest-selling US band of all timeMute

Glenn Frey: some musical highlights of Eagles guitarist’s career

Paul Lester

Tuesday 19 January 2016 23.02 AEDT 

If the Eagles were America’s band, Glenn Frey was the one who helped make them so. “Glenn was the one who started it all,” the band’s co-leader Don Henley wrote on hearing of Frey’s death on Monday 18 January. “He was the spark plug, the man with the plan. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and a work ethic that wouldn’t quit. He was funny, bullheaded, mercurial, generous, deeply talented and driven.”

That drive was there from an early age, when the guitarist made his name in the bands the Mushrooms, the Subterraneans and the Four of Us, playing around his home town of Detroit. “He was really into this whole role of being a teen king,” one local told the music journalist turned film-maker Cameron Crowe when he was writing a Rolling Stone cover story about the Eagles.
Frey moved to Los Angeles with dreams of making it big. On day one in the city, he happened to spy David Crosby in full rock star regalia – green leather bat cape and hat – and saw it as an omen. He formed a duo, Longbranch Pennywhistle, with one aspiring troubadour, JD Souther, before learning the rudiments of songcraft from another, Jackson Browne, with whom he and Souther briefly shared an apartment. He made the right associations with Laurel Canyon royalty: Linda Ronstadt, who invited Frey and Henley to become her backing band, and hippie magnate David Geffen, who signed them to his label Asylum once they had recruited Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner and taken flight as the Eagles.
The Eagles may have looked like mellow rockers but there was nothing laidback about Frey’s determination to succeed where earlier country-rockers had failed. “We had it all planned,” he declared. “We’d watched bands like Poco and the [Flying] Burrito Brothers lose their initial momentum. We were determined not to make the same mistakes. This was gonna be our best shot. Everybody had to look good, sing good, play good and write good. We wanted it all. Peer respect. AM and FM success. No 1 singles and albums, great music and a lot of money.”
Unkind assessments of the Eagles had them pinned as a sort of country-rock Monkees, manufactured into being, all outlaw trappings but little substance. Gram Parsons was sniffy, regarding them as a diluted, even bastardised, version of what he’d tried to achieve with the Byrds and the Burritos. Neil Young afforded them begrudging respect when he declared in 1975, “If only for perfectly capturing the feel of LA, the Eagles are the one band that’s carried on the spirit of Buffalo Springfield.”

A more generous view is that the Eagles were a gateway to supposedly cooler country rock, from Gram to the Grateful Dead, and that they created the space for Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson to become national treasures. Just as the Rolling Stones did with the blues, the Eagles introduced a generation to country. Still, if the counterculture didn’t want them, the mainstream did, thanks to Frey and Henley, who steered the Eagles towards colossal success. “Frey and Henley,” decided Crowe in Rolling Stone, “are the band’s primary students of the music business. They devour all the trade magazines, reading sales figures and interview features like most businessmen read Wall Street Journal.” The website savingcountrymusic.com deemed Frey the Eagles’ “most polarising figure”, his “rapaciousness for dealing with the business affairs of the band” earning him the reputation of a “money first, then music” musician. It also pointed out that without that hard-nosed approach, the Eagles might not have become the biggest-selling American band of all time.
Of course, without Frey’s perfectionist streak in the studio, his pure, slightly melancholy tenor (that’s him singing on the Eagles hits Lyin’ Eyes, Take It Easy and Tequila Sunrise) and the songs he co-wrote with Henley and the other members, that business acumen would have had no valuable outlet. If Henley brought the blues, Frey – a big fan of 60s Motown, the lush early-70s productions of Thom Bell for the Spinners and Delfonics, and even Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall – inveigled R&B elements into the Eagles’ music. They may have been quintessential heartland rockers offering blue-collar country for the masses, but listen again to One of These Nights (Frey’s own favourite Eagles track) or I Can’t Tell You Why, both suffused with soul sorrow, and you will hear a sweet sound closer to Memphis than to Nashville.
Frey was also prone to bust-ups – his seething aside to second guitarist Don Felder, “I’m gonna kick your ass when we get off the stage”, has entered rock lore – and he did his fair share of partying: there was nothing ersatz about his embrace of 70s rock star excess. But if the Eagles were corporate, he was the CEO, always putting work first. “Here’s my theory: I loved music more than anything else. More than I loved partying,” he told US radio host Dan Patrick in April 2015. “We were functioning party animals. We never missed work. We always showed up in relatively good shape.”
Like Henley, he found success outside of the band in the 80s, after they split in acrimonious circumstances, reaching No 2 with the The Heat Is On, and even acting on TV and in movies such as Jerry Maguire. But the Eagles remained his first love. Or rather, love-hate: their 1994 comeback tour was wryly named Hell Freezes Over. Frey was still touring with them up to last year, even if life on the road wasn’t quite as crazed as at the band’s hedonistic zenith. Asked by Patrick what the band did these days on the road, Frey quipped: “We sleep.”

If the Eagles’ commercial standing in the 70s was matched by critical loathing, more recently their music – and the same can be said of Fleetwood Mac, who were equally reviled as purveyors of mellow pabulum – has gained acceptance and appreciation. Since Frey’s death, artists as varied as Ryan Adams and Justin Timberlake have praised him on Twitter.
The US rocker Bob Seger, who also came through the 60s Detroit rock scene, summed up Frey and the Eagles’ status best when he heard of his old friend’s death: “The Eagles weren’t very well liked by critics, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t important,” he told the Detroit News. “The reason they were important … was Glenn Frey.”
• This article was amended on 19 January 2016 to attribute the quote from Bob Seger to the Detroit News.